(Below) How about these
ten
geezers, all about the same age? (90-91):)

Who will be next to go??? Bwaahahaha!!

In 1989 Red took the GBS remote unit to Placerville and recorded 77 Minutes of the great Eliot Daniel at his
home Steinway.
Click to hear it Eliot was a radio ham, and Red?s best
friend. He was a top Hollywood composer and arranger; known for many movie sound tracks, TV
themes, etc.?????????? ????????????????????

At the main desk during the show...

After
a show, by the palace door:

If you pop the radio
dial over to the classic rock AM station now and then you might luck into
a novelty song by Nervous Norvus, most likely "Transfusion," the 1956 top
ten hit that got the ball rolling for this most unusual artist. It was a
song with a horrific body count, accompanied by the sounds of skidding
tires and crashing cars that ushered in a bizarre sub-genre of more
subdued tragedy tunes, but this one was all tongue-in-cheek.

Nervous Norvus was the performing name of Jimmy Drake, the other
Memphis truck driver to hit the scene in 1956. Drake's passion for music
and his twisted sense of humor collided in a most non-lucrative way, but
ol' Jimmy was all about having fun, so he built a makeshift recording
studio in his kitchen and started his own business making demos for
songwriters. For those who've never heard about that world before, the gig
is that some songwriters can't play or sing, so they take their songs to
someone who can, and that person makes a tape that they can send around to
recording artists in hopes of making a sale. Drake made very simple
recordings, usually featuring only his voice and his baritone ukulele or
tenor guitar, both of which he played just well enough to do the job.
Listening to those demos today you can't help but notice that, despite his
limitations, there was something genuinely engaging about his
performances. Or, at least, most of them.

Norton Records once again proves to be a label dedicated to preserving
the things people long ago forgot were cool, and as usual they do it up
big. Stone Age Woo, The Zorch Sounds of Nervous Norvus, collects not just
the six singles you may possibly know, but 33 tracks on a single disc,
accompanied by a ten-page booklet with a detailed track list and the
well-told story of Drake's life. As Weird Al had his Dr. Demento, Jimmy
Drake had Red Blanchard, a bandleader and disk jockey who did a program
that included novelty songs. Drake would send his homemade recordings and
Blanchard offered encouragement. In fact, when Blanchard received Drake's
recording of "Transfusion" in '56, he liked it but decided it needed a
li'l something, and it was he who added the sounds of screams, skids and
crashes before putting it on the air and causing a stir. "Zorch," by the
way, was one of Blanchard's words, as was "Nervous," though not the way we
mean it. To Blanchard and his followers, it meant "Cool." "Zorch" and many
other bits of Blanchardspeak would show up in Drake's tunes over the next
few years, and now, of course, you realize he was actually "Cool Norvus."
One of those nervous but little-known stories from the history of pop
music.

Is 33 tracks of mostly demos from a novelty artist something you're
going to want to listen to? Probably not all at once, but taken in just a
few bites, it's a worthy listening choice. It's funny, clever, sometimes
annoying, but almost always charming in a way that's hard to nail down.
Knowing the full story (or as full a story as you can know in 10 pages) of
Jimmy Drake makes it still more entertaining. If you don't know the
history between Drake and Blanchard, "I Listen to Red in Bed" makes no
sense.

Odd little song, that. Drake sings the first half in a high falsetto,
in the character of a little boy who listens to the Red Blanchard show on
a radio his mother doesn't know he's hidden in his teddy bear. He sings
the second half in his own voice and tells of listening to Blanchard's
show late at night on a radio his wife doesn't know he's hidden in his
Belfast (whiskey) jug. Can't be autobiographical, though. Ol' Nervous was
40-somethin' by the time he ever heard Red Blanchard. A clever little
middle-aged boy.

A note about General
Broadcasting System/GBS:

Red
was syndicating radio shows to various stations
and decided to invent that name; and registered it
with the U.S.
Patent office back in 1957. The name, and GBS logo
have been in continuous use since that time, and
any other use of the name "General Broadcasting"
or "GBS" constitutes an illegal use of copyrighted
property.